On Father’s Day my millionaire son walked into my freezing apartment, saw the tinned soup on the table, and asked how I was managing on the eight thousand a month his wife sends me. I told him nobody sends me anything.

There was no decision. There was no moment. Nobody stood in a hallway and resolved anything.

A drawer filled up, and a man of sixty-six found somewhere else to put things, in about four seconds, on a Saturday.

Now my part, and this is the whole of it and everything above is the detail.

I was a corporate auditor for forty years.

I have stood in rooms and told people that the account nobody looks at is where the whole thing goes wrong. I said it so often that two different colleagues put it on a card for me when I retired.

And I left an account unexamined for ten years because opening it meant reading my wife’s name in a window.

That is the entire story and there is nothing underneath it.